If you were a serious sleeper agent, wouldn't that be enough time for you to at least delete any easily-accessible evidence?
I re-skimmed the article - it's skimpy on the details. I speculate ..
He did delete the files. Drag to the Recycle Bin, do the 'delete forever' thing and they're gone. Except they're not, because everybody knows that deletion isn't really deleting files, it's only telling the OS that the space occupied by the file can be written to.
Except not very many people know that. You can recover files that have been deleted. You can (I am told, but have never done it) recover files from a formatted hard drive.
We assume a sleeper agent knows this and would trash the hard drive - wipe it with a magnet, put it in a shredder, drop it in the ocean, something - but I do not know how likely this is.
So Sleeper Agent deletes the files. Maybe he formats the hard drive. Later his equipment is seized, the FBI does forensics on his drive and .. hey presto - recovered files.
If this trend continues much further, then I'll start worrying about public schools morphing into propaganda machines. (I went through 13 years of public schooling myself, by the way.)
I will note that my kids attend public schools. I did as well. I do believe that if we're going to keep a Republic it's essential that we transmit it's core values some way.
I don't think we're doing that. I know that I didn't get much in the 70s and 80s, and kids in school (my daughter is a freshman this year) are getting less of that than I did.
If we don't know what we've got, then it's easy to loose it. Kids today might never know what they had after it's all over.
no subject
I re-skimmed the article - it's skimpy on the details. I speculate ..
He did delete the files. Drag to the Recycle Bin, do the 'delete forever' thing and they're gone. Except they're not, because everybody knows that deletion isn't really deleting files, it's only telling the OS that the space occupied by the file can be written to.
Except not very many people know that. You can recover files that have been deleted. You can (I am told, but have never done it) recover files from a formatted hard drive.
We assume a sleeper agent knows this and would trash the hard drive - wipe it with a magnet, put it in a shredder, drop it in the ocean, something - but I do not know how likely this is.
So Sleeper Agent deletes the files. Maybe he formats the hard drive. Later his equipment is seized, the FBI does forensics on his drive and .. hey presto - recovered files.
If this trend continues much further, then I'll start worrying about public schools morphing into propaganda machines. (I went through 13 years of public schooling myself, by the way.)
I will note that my kids attend public schools. I did as well. I do believe that if we're going to keep a Republic it's essential that we transmit it's core values some way.
I don't think we're doing that. I know that I didn't get much in the 70s and 80s, and kids in school (my daughter is a freshman this year) are getting less of that than I did.
If we don't know what we've got, then it's easy to loose it. Kids today might never know what they had after it's all over.